The best selling FPGA board

[awigaxeh-443]

shut the fuck up you poor retard

bfl single does 800 mhs and costs the same

goddamned worthless neanderthal

[TheSeven]

shut the fuck up you poor retard

bfl single does 800 mhs and costs the same

goddamned worthless neanderthal

...and uses 4 times the power.

Also, please watch your language.

[awigaxeh-443]

nobody cares about power usage, that is way too cheap

[TheSeven]

nobody cares about power usage, that is way too cheap

Why would anyone buy FPGA miners then?

The reasons are simple:
There are regions on this planet where electricity costs like $0.30/kWh, and running GPUs is just not profitable any more. And it won't be long until the BFL isn't either.
There are often limits on how much power you can actually draw or how much heat you can actually remove at a given place, so sometimes this might be the only option to further expand your hashing power, even if you have cheap electricity.
If you account for the power you need for air conditioning, FPGAs overtake GPU profitability at way lower electricity rates than you'd think.

[Syke]

nobody cares about power usage, that is way too cheap

Someday you too will care ... when you move out of mom's basement.

[DiabloD3]

shut the fuck up you poor retard

bfl single does 800 mhs and costs the same

goddamned worthless neanderthal

Angry neighborhood bastard mod here.

I suggest you never piss off an apex predator.

[Dhomochevsky]

Oh, this thread will probably be a little cleaner from now. Regarding the BFL single - I think it only uses twice the w/MH traditional FPGAs use. Wasn't it ~80 Wh for ~800 MH? Icarus and x6500 use 40 Wh for that amount of hashing.

[rupy]

Yup, but for me passive cooling computing means so much more than MH/s... silence to hear yourself think! I have 1GH/s and that draws 40W with ZTEX.

[BFL-Engineer]

Oh, this thread will probably be a little cleaner from now. Regarding the BFL single - I think it only uses twice the w/MH traditional FPGAs use. Wasn't it ~80 Wh for ~800 MH? Icarus and x6500 use 40 Wh for that amount of hashing.

I might correct that it's ~85W for 832MH/s. Of course, the board itself consumes 71-72W, but the inefficiency of the PSU
takes up to ~85W. One could use a central PSU for multiple singles, with a higher efficiency...


All the best,

[TheSeven]

Oh, this thread will probably be a little cleaner from now. Regarding the BFL single - I think it only uses twice the w/MH traditional FPGAs use. Wasn't it ~80 Wh for ~800 MH? Icarus and x6500 use 40 Wh for that amount of hashing.

I meant four times the power per board (for twice the hashes per board).

[ngzhang]

shut the fuck up you poor retard

bfl single does 800 mhs and costs the same

goddamned worthless neanderthal

order 1 for 599 USD .

wait up to  4 months.

that means, 4 months mining @ 820MH can generate 60 BTCs. about 300 USD.

so this equal to you spent 900+ USD on it...

[nedbert9]

shut the fuck up you poor retard

bfl single does 800 mhs and costs the same

goddamned worthless neanderthal

order 1 for 599 USD .

wait up to  4 months.

that means, 4 months mining @ 820MH can generate 60 BTCs. about 300 USD.

so this equal to you spent 900+ USD on it...

Sad, but true.  I wish I could get some bulk discount on Icarus

[OgNasty]

How about links in the OP to the board threads.

[DeepBit]

Sad, but true.  I wish I could get some bulk discount on Icarus ;)

There are already great bulk discounts on Icarus :)

[Dhomochevsky]

How about links in the OP to the board threads.

Done. Also, updated some figures.

[ngzhang]

Icarus Batch3 shipped out 220 boards.
plus previous 2 batches, there are about 260 total. 

[Dhomochevsky]

Updated.

[Energizer]

Icarus is the best! For few simple valuable reasons:

1- It can be used as a dev board not just for mining!
2- ONLY ~20 Watts
3- The price "569$" is considered to be the lowest price as it comes fully equipped with fan/heat sink/power adapter/usb cable!
4- Zhang is always in time!

Thank you Zhang for developing such impressive boards "ICARUS" we are looking forward for your new design "Lancelot"!

[Pipesnake]

There is no "best".  Considering MPBM has support for everything there is no reason they can't all play nicely together.  At this point I think it all depends on what's available.

[TheSeven]

There is no "best".  Considering MPBM has support for everything there is no reason they can't all play nicely together.  At this point I think it all depends on what's available.

Yes, finally it has support for all of them. Even for BFL

There are definitely some pros and cons for every board. I'll try to summarize (neutrally):

BFL Single:

• Excellent price/performance ratio for an FPGA board
• Temperature sensors
• Shipped from USA
• Very high power consumption and heat dissipation for an FPGA board
• High lead times
• Very odd communication protocol, causes quite some inefficiencies
• Completely unusable with P2Pool (>50% stales)
• Overheats really easily
• Not stackable

Icarus:

• Lots of expansion headers and I/Os routed, thus extensible, and possibly usable for other FPGA projects
• Probably the most heat robust board
• Stackable
• Shipped from China
• Uses speed grade 2 FPGA, thus ~20-30MH/s less than the other Spartan6 boards
• No heatsink mounting holes
• No temperature sensors
• Discontinued

X6500 Rev. 3:

• Spartan 6 Speed grade 3 FPGA
• Molex power connector (additionally to barrel connector)
• Standard 3pin molex fan headers
• Heatsink mounting holes
• Temperature sensors
• Fresh batch currently shipping (available at Cablesaurus)
• Can be cooled by big fans from the side (low noise level)
• Stackable
• Shipped from USA
• Relatively high miner software CPU load due to interface design issues, will be fixed in future revisions

ZTEX:

• Spartan 6 Speed grade 3 FPGA
• Standard 3pin molex fan headers
• Low lead times
• Heatsink mounting holes
• Stackable
• Shipped from Germany
• Only a single FPGA, thus relatively high price, especially at low quantities
• Relatively high miner software CPU load due to interface design issues
• No temperature sensors